Medium severity · published Aug 27, 2026
CVE-2026-81724
NLTK before 3.10.3 Denial of Service via Uncontrolled Recursion
5.3
CVSS
0.5%
EPSS
No
On KEV
Description
NLTK before 3.10.3 contains an uncontrolled recursion vulnerability in nltk.featstruct.FeatStructReader that allows unauthenticated attackers to cause a denial of service by supplying deeply nested feature-structure input. Attackers can craft trivial payloads with nested brackets that exceed Python's recursion limit and raise an unhandled RecursionError, crashing applications that parse user-supplied feature structures or feature grammars.
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L
Attack vector
Network
Complexity
Low
Privileges
None
User interaction
None
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
None
Availability
Low
Scope
Unchanged
Exploitation
Is it being used?
Exploit prediction (EPSS)0.5% · higher than 39% of CVEs
Exploited in the wildNo evidence yet
CISA KEVNot listed
Ransomware campaign useNot known
Affected products
Which versions
NL
nltk · nltk
before 3.10.3 · source: vendor, NVD
References
NVD
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-81724
CVE.org
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-81724
Exploit
https://github.com/nltk/nltk/security/advisories/GHSA-cw6x-m8jw-qmrh
Third Party Advisory
https://www.vulncheck.com/advisories/nltk-before-3.10.3-denial-of-service-via-uncontrolled-recursion
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